Continuing my kick of including archival photos in this week’s posts, here is a shot that illustrates “back to school.” It was taken in Anaheim, CA in 1915, and that’s my bespectacled 15-year-old maternal grandma, Lorene, right smack in the middle of a bunch of classmates. She ended up attending the University of Denver, as it was then called. We have letters written in 1919 in which she reports on the fact that she has not caught the “influenza” but others in her dormitory have.
And here’s a shot of her daughter, my mother, Carol, on a first day of school in the 1930s in Ottawa, Kansas. This was before backpacks were invented. My mom also went to college in Denver for her first two years, then transferred to Denison University in Granville, Ohio.
Tomorrow my first baby, Ian, will travel to Baltimore to tour two colleges. Here he is in a newspaper photo back in 3rd grade, preparing for a Y2K crisis that never arrived.
He’ll have an interview and a portfolio review, and I’ll experience sticker shock, and he’ll help drive – because he got his full-fledged license last week – and it’s all starting to happen really fast. I’m sure my great-grandparents felt the same way when their firstborn, Lorene, went off to Denver.
